“Morning, Sir,” replied Swinton urgently. “Sorry to bother you, but we’re picking up reports that the Russians have broken the ceasefire in Ukraine. Seems they launched an early hours assault with airborne forces and they’re now attacking toward Crimea. The picture’s still pretty confused. There’s an Ops update at 0830, with a NAC called in Brussels for 1400 hours. I’ve tasked Sergeant James to collect you at 0800.”

“Thanks, Jamie, I’ve got that. See you in the office,” said McKinlay, switching on the TV in the corner of the kitchen as he put down the phone and picked up his tea. As the BBC World channel came to life, he was shocked to see the sleek, low silhouette of Russian T-14 Armarta tanks, newly in service from 2016, with their smoothbore 125 millimeter guns traversing menacingly as they raced unopposed through a burning Ukrainian village. As Jamie had just warned him, this looked different. This was no longer “proxies,” or Russians pretending to be Ukrainians causing trouble in Ukraine, these were elite Russian forces crossing the Ukrainian border and advancing toward Crimea.

He put down his wife’s mug of tea and sipped his own as he continued to watch, appalled yet at the same time fascinated, as television news reporters brought him a raw flow of images of the unfolding strategic and humanitarian disaster.

1400 hours, Sunday, May 14, 2017

North Atlantic Council Conference Room, NATO Headquarters, Brussels

THE LAST TIME the North Atlantic Council had met on a Sunday was six years previously, during the Libyan crisis of 2011. None of this crop of NATO ambassadors had been around back then, as McKinlay knew full well when he stumped into the NAC Conference Room. From the looks on their faces he sensed their shock and disbelief that, yet again, the President had taken them all by surprise with this morning’s attack to open up the land corridor to Crimea. The question they were all asking was whether he would stop there.

McKinlay was also only too aware of the importance of his position as he took in the flags of the twenty-eight NATO nations hanging on poles around the walls in alphabetical order. And there, in the center of the Council chamber, was the circular table around which the NATO ambassadors sat and at which so many questions and crises concerning the defense of Western Europe and the North Atlantic area had been discussed, shelved and occasionally resolved, since its formation in 1949. Somehow NATO had always come through in the past and he was determined that it would not fail on his watch.

There was the usual noise and bustle as ambassadors took their seats and their aides and note takers crammed themselves into the chairs behind them. McKinlay saw that US Navy Admiral Max Howard, the SACEUR, was already seated next to the Chairman of the Military Committee, the Danish general, Knud Vahr.